


The End of Paris

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Casablanca (1942)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Everything is terrible, F/M, Minor Original Character(s), Occupation, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2018-09-21 16:23:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9557057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: Paris, June 1940. Ilsa breaks a promise, and keeps a vow.





	1. Chapter 1

Ilsa has plans for three scenarios. She turns them over and over in her mind, trying to focus on where their weaknesses are. She cannot afford to think about her own weakness.

The first plan is the easiest. In this vision of her immediate future, Victor releases her. They cannot be anything other than strangers to each other, after this absence; of this she is sure. She knows herself to be irrevocably changed, and he… She shies away from that thought. He releases her. He will greet her with warmth, but soon return to whatever matter he is engaged in. When they are alone, she will explain. And he will understand, as he has always understood everything. As he has always understood her. Even if he regrets her departure, it will not be a wound. Gone more than a year—and they had known each other a fraction of that time! She will leave, and she will collect her luggage, and she will join Rick, as she promised. 

There is also the possibility that he will choose not to understand. He might confront her with their shared cause, with their shared vows… even with her duty to him. And she will have to leave him in anger. Ilsa shivers. 

“Stop here,” she says to the taxi driver. They had all agreed—Jean, Christophe, Françoise—that the safest way was for her to come alone. So she had left Rick, had let him put her into a cab, and had changed to a new one at the nearest Metro station. She tips well enough to make a favorable impression, not well enough to be conspicuous. She fixes her lipstick on the pavement, establishing herself (she hopes) as a woman with an assignation. As indeed she is. 

Inside the bistro, she takes her time fixing her hair, folding her scarf. She had expected to see him instantly. He was almost always the tallest man in a room; always he was unmistakable. Ilsa feels betrayed by the rapid beating of her heart. She folds herself into a corner, her back braced against the wall. She keeps her teeth from chattering as she orders a Cointreau. 

In the second of her scenarios, she could stand up to him, an opponent on equal ground. The lines of their argument are clear, and Victor has always been good at seeing essentials. That the essential, here, is her love for another man… Ilsa presses her mouth more firmly shut. Her third scenario is the worst she has imagined. In this vision, he is angry, and she recognizes his right to be. In this vision, driven by guilt, she stays. Cradling her glass in both hands, Ilse sips steadily from her Cointreau. 

“So sorry to be late.”

She catches her breath; it is not the voice she expected. “Christophe.” She gives him both hands. His kiss of greeting lingers longer than necessary.

“We’ll leave as soon as possible,” he murmurs against her cheek.


	2. Chapter 2

Christophe orders a brandy and drinks it, she thinks, a little too fast. But today of all days, there are many men drinking too fast, and many women holding back tears. They do not stand out from their surroundings. 

“Good,” he says at last, and lays a hand briefly over hers. Keeping up appearances, Ilsa gives him one of her most radiant smiles, allows him to help her with her coat. He tucks her arm through his, walks them briskly out of the bistro. Ilsa is tall enough to resist this, and takes a sharp, guilty pleasure in making him check his stride. 

“Where are we going?” For the benefit of any observers, she turns her face to his.

“Victor.” 

“Why didn’t he come himself?”

They walk to the second corner and turn before Christophe breaks his silence again. “He’s ill.” Ilsa waits, but there is no elaboration. This gives her a new set of images to work with—Victor, feverish and drawn, distracted by his own nervous energy, greeting her with something like habitual tenderness. Or Victor, prosaically burdened with a head cold, trying to run a Resistance cell without forgetting where he put his handkerchief. She’s seen him do it before. He always loses the handkerchief. 

Ilsa shivers. She cannot get used to the idea of Victor _alive_. Alive, after the months of her desperate anxiety… and then, the terrible certainty of grief. She had imagined his knock on the door, or the key in the lock; the pebbles at the window, or the midnight telephone call. And then there had been nothing to hope for. And then—she takes a deep breath—there had been Rick.

Ilsa notices the truck when they are still some distance away. It’s drawn up in front of a courtyard, but no bustle of loading or unloading is visible. When they are abreast of it, she realizes that the strategy is more elaborate than she had suspected. Stepping swiftly into the shadow of the courtyard’s swinging doors, Christophe swings her gently against the wall, and leans towards her. Ilsa’s entire body thrums with tension. After a too-long moment, another man and woman walk out of the courtyard. The man is about Christophe’s height; like Christophe, he wears a dark suit. 

“In the truck,” breathes Christophe, and they clamber over the front wheel, under the canvas. Ilsa bumps her shin painfully against the metal side. Their breathing sounds loud to her in the close darkness. Then the truck rumbles to life, the floor beneath them vibrating. They are in motion before Ilsa risks speech.

“Where are we going?”

“Le Bourget. The rail yard. We’ve hidden him in a freight car.”


	3. Chapter 3

_We’ve hidden him in a freight car._ Ilsa sits with her shoulders back, holding herself very still; she does not want Christophe to feel her trembling. She is angry at the young man’s silences, at his arrogance. After the truck has gone a few miles, it occurs to her that he is angry with her, too. Or jealous of her, the woman who appears to live normally, and is still the mistress of his hero…

“He sent for me, I suppose,” says Ilsa.

“Yes.” 

They do not speak again before the truck comes to its final halt. It does, after all, carry a legitimate cargo. Christophe and Ilsa descend ahead of the barrels. Once they are within the yard, Christophe explains: 

“The foreman’s selectively blind, for a price. He doesn’t know…”

“Understood.”

She is lost among the sidings by the time they finally stop. Christophe takes out a cigarette and a matchbox. He lets a match burn to his fingers. “Should use a lighter,” he says, and the door of the boxcar is slid open by Françoise.

“Jean is still with the truck,” says Christophe, without greeting her. “We can move if we have to.”

Françoise nods crisply. “We’re safest here, I think. For the present. Go change your clothes; get some sleep. If one of you can relieve me before the foreman leaves…”

Christophe nods. “ _D’accord._ ” Without further words, he puts out his hand to help Ilsa into the boxcar. Giving her other hand to Françoise, Ilsa manages to get up, not without tearing a stocking. Kneeling at Christophe’s eye level, she can’t help feeling that it isn’t _fair_. Only twelve hours ago her plans had been simple: to finish Henri’s champagne, to pack her bags, and to flee with her lover to a new life…

As Ilsa gets to her feet, Françoise closes the door behind her. Then, without speaking, she draws Ilsa into her arms. And in Françoise’s embrace, Ilsa knows a new fear; she knows that all of her scenarios have been inadequate. When Françoise releases her, there are tears in the other woman’s eyes.

“He’s delirious, sometimes.” Françoise cuts her sentences short, as if she’s afraid they’ll escape her control. “Exhausted, that goes without saying. I tell him it’s all right to sleep.” Françoise exhales shakily, running a hand through her dark hair. “I’ll leave you for a bit.” The corner of her mouth quirks. “Surprisingly private, a boxcar.” 

Ilsa puts her hand on the other woman’s arm. “Thank you.” Françoise smiles—brief but genuine—and retreats to the far end of the car. Ilsa’s eyes have adjusted to the darkness. Only faint, grey light enters through the slats, showing her crates, a carelessly thrown tarpaulin. Victor must be behind the crates. Ilsa quickens her step. Soon she will know the worst.


	4. Chapter 4

What Ilsa notices first is that there isn’t enough space for a man behind the crates. Then she sees him. Her initial thought is that this is wrong. It is wrong for a body to be so easily overlooked. It is wrong that he should lie here, shrunken, _small_ , he who has always been larger than life. 

“Victor.” Ilsa kneels beside the tarpaulin. She supposes it’s the warmest thing they had. His face seems made of bone and shadow. Ilsa swallows, twice, and finds her mouth still dry. “Victor,” she says again. She used to think of him as leonine, splendid; his hair has been unevenly shorn, and a jagged scar runs back from his forehead. Above his right eye, another scar, thin and angry. 

Very carefully, Ilsa lifts an edge of the tarpaulin. More carefully still, she takes his right hand in hers. She had always loved his hands. Now the long fingers are marred with healing cuts… and, on the soft flesh at the base of the thumb, a livid burn. Ilsa blinks rapidly in an attempt to dismiss the threat of tears.

He gasps like a drowning man breaking the surface of the Seine. Looking up, Ilsa finds him staring past her. Slowly his gaze focuses, but his face does not clear. Ilsa forces what she fears is a bad imitation of a smile.

“Ilsa.” She thinks of his voice commanding, caressing; it is now a hoarse whisper.

“Yes.” She raises her left hand to the side of his face. “It’s all right. I’m here.” For a moment, Ilsa thinks he is going to speak again, but he closes his eyes.

Ilsa can feel the hair on her arms standing up. Within her pulses a panic urge to escape, to get out of this stifling dark. There is a life waiting for her. There is a life waiting for her where she could dance till all hours in Rick’s arms, instead of lying alone in a cold bed, wondering if this is the meeting her husband won’t survive. They could take country drives, or city walks, without the man next to her thinking about where a sniper’s bullet might come from. She shivers. Rick would be a fugitive, yes; but he wouldn’t be a figurehead. And, oh! they could simply be lovers to each other, even with the world crumbling around them.

Only when he returns the pressure does she realize she has tightened her grip on Victor’s hand. Ilsa catches her breath; _this is impossible._

“Thank you,” says Victor, suddenly and clearly, “I’m quite all right. I just needed…” His dialogue with an imagined interlocutor trails off into a barely perceptible thread of sound.

And with that, quite suddenly, Ilsa finds herself weeping.


	5. Chapter 5

Françoise emerges from the shadows with a brisk and silent tread. Wordlessly, she hands Ilsa a flask. Obediently Ilsa drinks, and coughs, and drinks again. She is conscious of surprise that the flask contains only water. After a few moments she hands it back; the other woman crouches on her haunches beside her.

“Christophe should have warned you.”

“I…” Ilsa swallows a renegade sob, and begins again. “He said he was ill.”

“ _Pfut!_ ”

Ilsa finishes wiping her tears with a shaking hand. “How—how did you learn he was alive?”

Françoise tilts her head expressively. “He turned up— _comme ça._ Of course,” she continues, “I’ve no idea how he crossed half Europe. _Merde!_ he has luck, that one. And courage.” 

“Yes.” There is a nail digging into the flesh beneath Ilsa’s knee. Feeling that there is something final about the action, she settles herself more securely into the corner, folding her legs beside her. She dares not take Victor’s head into her lap.

“What made you come?” asks Françoise suddenly. “It’s more than a year since he disappeared. Granted, you were afraid for him, grieved for him—I’m not saying the contrary. But why come _now_ , with so much at risk and so little…” Her sentence trails off and she shrugs, as if to deprecate her own vehemence. “If he were in his right mind, he wouldn’t expect it.”

“I know he wouldn’t.” _Despite everything_ ; she presses her lips shut on that additional truth. “Victor,” begins Ilsa, feeling her way, “was the first man who treated me like a woman, and not like a girl; like someone to be reasoned with and respected. He spoke about the world I was afraid of, and about the world as I wanted it to be. I worshipped him a little, I think.”

“Very pretty,” says Françoise dryly. “But—pardon me—you do know you’re risking your life?”

Ilsa is silent a moment, looking at Victor’s ravaged face. “Yes.” She thinks of the man who is waiting for her, of her life as a woman who could laugh, tease her lover, walk unafraid. “Yes, I know.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m staying. But…" Ilsa moistens her lips. "I need to write a letter. Would you—would you see it delivered?”

Françoise nods tightly. “It’ll have to pass through many hands.”

“Understood.”

Ilsa’s eyes fill with tears as she searches in her bag. Clean notepaper, a gold pen—they seem anachronistic, somehow, as well as inadequate, the equipment of a different age, a different existence. 

“ _Richard,_ ” she writes, “ _I cannot go with you…_ ”


	6. Chapter 6

She had imagined Victor’s return as celebration, as relief. She had imagined him returning to her as to shelter. She had imagined them embracing in sunlight, the pieces of her life falling back into place. Now she sits next to her husband’s body, all certainties vanished, and the gray day seems endless. Despite the other woman’s kindness, Ilsa is glad when Françoise is relieved by Jean, taking with her the irrevocable letter to Rick. She tries not to feel that she is guilty of a double betrayal. 

Jean, the oldest of the three, has a pugilist’s square stance and misshapen nose. With flat cap and satchel, he looks, thinks Ilsa, the perfect _ouvrier_.

“No doctor, I’m afraid,” he greets her. “Ours is an Austrian refugee, and he’s gone to earth somewhere. Hardly surprising.” He hands her a canteen. “Fresh water; get him to drink it if you can.” Dropping to one knee beside her, he undoes the buckles of his satchel. “Bread and cheese, if you’re hungry.”

Ilsa shakes her head quickly.

“Takes you that way, eh? Well, I’ll leave the bread.” Jean lurches back to his feet, rubs pensively at his unshaven chin. “The plan is to move tonight.”

“But—” Ilsa’s protest ends on an intake of breath.

Jean lays a finger alongside his nose, closing one eye theatrically. “Christophe is repainting the truck. We’ll do the first stage in an ambulance.” Ilsa finds herself irrationally heartened by the fact and Jean’s confidence; but he turns without waiting for a reply, and lies down on the opposite side of the car, shaping his satchel into a makeshift pillow. 

She is, then, alone—alone with the harsh sighing of her husband’s breath, the hollow sighing of the wind. Ilsa shivers. Unwilling to release Victor’s hand, she lies down on top of the tarpaulin. She has entered a new world, and she does not know her place in it. What is she to these people, she who once sat on the edges of their conversations? And what is she to the man lying beside her? What must she become?

To distract herself from thought, Ilsa sings softly, a song she has known since the cradle: “The man he walked in the timber wood, _hei fara_ …” How far had Victor walked, and over what paths? “There sat a crow in the grove and crowed, _hei fara…_ ” How many signs of death had he ignored?

The first gusts of rain strike the boxcar like a warning salvo. “The man he thought with his whole self, _hei fara,_ , with his whole self—perhaps that crow means to kill me. _Hei fara, faltu riltu…_ ”

“Ilsa.” Her voice deserts her. She freezes, as though her slightest move could be a wrong one. “Where are we?”

“A freight car.” She revises: “Paris. Paris, but the Nazis are in the streets.”

“I wasn’t certain—” A cough breaks his phrase and shakes his body; Ilsa is obliged to sit up, reach for the water. It is an awkward, fumbling job they make of it between them. But at last he relapses—his head against her shoulder, his hand over her wrist where she supports the canteen.

“I wasn’t certain,” Victor murmurs, “that you would be here.”

That she would be in Paris, or that she would come here, to its dirty outskirts, to him? Ilsa does not ask the question. “It was chance that they found me,” she says, and feels guilty for not saying _luck_. “I had given up hoping for you.” And then, with sudden vehemence: “They said you had been killed, Victor; they told me you were dead.”

“Almost.” The breathless whisper is scarcely audible, but unmistakably triumphant. “Not quite.”

“Victor…” she begins, and stops. Terrifyingly trusting he lies in her arms.

“Yes?”

“Nothing. You’re burning with fever.”

“Hm!” He is silent for several moments. She watches the shallow, hitching motion of his breathing; observes, with wonder, the faint shadow of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The disconcertingly apt Norwegian lullaby is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVm5WPCqBOI

**Author's Note:**

> I think far, far too much about the script of _Casablanca_. On her first night in Casablanca, Ilsa says to Rick, about Victor "They were hiding him in a freight car on the outskirts of Paris." And when is Victor Laszlo ever the object of a verb, instead of an actor? This question (and my deep love for Ingrid Bergman) led to this.


End file.
